Health is the amount of damage you can sustain before you die. [1, 2] You accumulate more health during the course of the game. [3, 4]

Outside of combat the new health regeneration system refills your health. [5, 6] You go into fast-regeneration if you haven't been damaged in 3 seconds. It takes about 5-8 seconds to go from 1 to 100% health. [7, 8]

If you survive an encounter you just start running to the next one and by the time you get there, you're usually back to full health. [7] It works surprisingly well and eliminates the frustrating upkeep of buying and constantly downing potions between encounters to keep your health up while also making combat a little more dynamic. [6, 8] Once you get used to it, you don't notice its there. [9]

You can't activate it inside of combat, but you can regenerate near enemies if you avoid getting hit for a few seconds. Enemy attacks interrupt the effect. [6, 10]
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Energy is your resource for using skills and covers both magical and non-magical abilities. [1, 2] It measures how far you can exert yourself at any given action either physically or mentally before you're exhausted. [1] When you run out of energy, you can still run or perform basic attacks but you are too tired to use any greater skill, be it a special sword attack or casting a curse. [3]

Energy doesn't fast-regenerate when not in combat like health, but the base regeneration rate is much faster than in TQ and putting points into Spirit has a much greater energy-regeneration payoff than Intelligence has in TQ. [4] Energy and energy-regeneration are more important than they were in TQ. [5] The cooldown on energy potions has been significantly increased giving energy management some meaning - you can't just spam energy pots anymore. [5, 6]

The skill costs are a bit more aggressive this time around. [3] Certain skills cost a lot of energy when used successively. [7] Passive skills cost no energy and help you always. [8]
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To create any sense of danger during an encounter the player must feel like it is possible for them to die. To have a heightened sense of danger, the player must feel like death is potentially imminent and they are constantly doing things to avoid it. To reduce actual player deaths the player needs some recourse that allows them to avoid dying during these situations. Health potions exist to facilitate this dynamic of ARPG combat. [1]

They are an element of resource management and you make the strategic decisions on when to use them. [2] You don't really use health potions much in Grim Dawn. [3] Their role should be as an emergency measure that allows people to survive close-calls in combat, endure inescapable situations such as entrapment until they can break free or preventing them from having to retreat at a critical moment. [2, 3]

Potions are fairly rare. [4] However, the game is not depending on rarity to limit people's potion use though. [5] That will primarily come in the form of their 30 second cooldown. [5, 6] In Titan Quest potions were a crutch for poorly balanced melee combat. Players had to constantly chug them to stay alive and keep fighting. [2] Crate has introduced other mechanics that should vastly reduce the need for potion chugging. [7]

Potions provide more regeneration than instant health. Drinking one before you go into battle is a strategy that adds to the anticipation of combat and probably gives a small amount of satisfaction to new players once they figure out how to take advantage of it. [1]

There will only be one type/size of health and energy potions. [7] Currently potions stack up to 50. The number isn't set in stone but 50 is probably the minimum. [7, 8] It's unlikely that anyone will accumulate more than one stack of health potions. [9] They are also rather expensive, so if you ever have much more than you need, selling them would be a good way to make money. [10]

Grim Dawn does not use an animation for potion drinking as it would immobilize your character. Such an animation totally defeats the purpose of potions, which is to save your ass when you're getting overwhelmed. [1, 11]

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The developers don't like energy potions and long for more tightly balanced encounters but ARPG gameplay mechanics and the expectations of players don't really support this. Spell casting classes would be forced to spend a protracted amount of time sitting around regenerating energy, if they run out of it and the game had no energy potions. Players wouldn't tolerate such a mechanic. [1] The developers believe they just need to make them more scarce and expensive and put in more alternative means of boosting energy regeneration so casters aren't reliant on energy potions. [12]
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Players shall have the support of better healing and energy regen capabilities through their skills. [1] Most, especially melee masteries have health recovery skills for to deal with health-loss during combat. This helps to reserve health potions more for the oh-shit moments. [2, 3]
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The occultist's summoned raven familiar has been set up with a healing spell that it is set to cast on allies whenever they are below 75% health. It generally feels pretty cool to have a pet that is healing you and have some reliance on it. It is especially awesome when you're getting hammered by enemies and your pet is there chain healing you, keeping you alive. [1] It also feels very rewarding when you think you're screwed and then suddenly your pet rescues you. [2]

The threshold has been set to 75% because it can take time for the AI to receive a status update indicating that one of its allies health is below healing level and then a little more time to cast the spell. At the longer end of the response-time spectrum, it may only be a second or two but for a class that doesn't have a lot of health to begin with, that can be life or death.

If the raven were previously healing the hellhound pet or another player ally in multiplayer, it could take a few seconds for it to finish the first heal and then turn and heal its master.

This early healing also helps in situations where the player is losing health faster than the raven can replenish it. In that case, starting early may allow the player to survive an extra couple seconds. [3]

Pet healing goes against medierra's personal design rule of avoiding mechanics where the game can cause players to fail or where it may not be clear that failure was the fault of the player. This can lead to players feeling cheated and becoming angry with the game. [2]

But the poll is so overwhelmingly in favor of keeping it so far that this may be a case where the coolness factor outweighs the potential negative. [4] The developers leave it in for the alpha, see how people react, and then they can always turn it into player skill and make the raven responsible for one of the curses or buffs that is currently under player control. [5]
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The developers have thought about turning shrine effects into power-up type orbs just so that they can appear more randomly as drops off enemies instead of having to be placed in levels. [1] They never intended to replace health potions with the healing-orb system and don't think it would be necessary or beneficial given the other changes they've made to health recovery. [1, 2, 3]

The methods of health recovery should have limits but be predictable and dependable. It is not fun to have to rely on some amount of luck to recover health. [1] They do actually like the idea of random instant-use drops like healing orbs and shrine-like buffs, just not as the sole means of healing. [2]
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